Tanaka locked her eyes on Teresa’s. I told you there was a problem with him. I told you he was degrading. “When we find him, you make the approach.”
“I understand.”
“I will take care of everything else.”
“I understand.”
“Daddy?”
The months had thinned him, but he hadn’t grown a beard. His cheeks were as smooth-shaved as if Kelly had seen to him that morning. The old pockmarks were evidence of boyhood acne he’d suffered through long before Teresa had known him. His clothes were the same he’d worn at the State Building in Laconia, and they weren’t ragged, but they seemed thin and brittle. Like paper that had been left in the rain and sun.
The black filaments that swirled in from the walls of the great, bright chamber laced into his arms and pierced his side. Tiny pulses ran through them, thickening and thinning. Flickers of blue danced in the black threads and seemed to vanish if she looked directly at them. When he opened his eyes, the irises glowed the same blue as the station, and they focused on nothing, like a blind man’s.
“Daddy?” she repeated, more softly this time.
The lips that had kissed her head as a baby curved into a smile. “Teresa? Is that you?”
“I’m here. I’m right here.”
“It’s going to be all right,” he said. “I dreamed too small before. I see that now. I thought I could save us by organizing, by keeping us together, and I was right about that. I was right, baby. But I didn’t understand how to do it.”
“Look at you,” Teresa said, pointing at the way the station pierced his body through. “Look what it did to you.”
“This is why it will work. The meat, the matter, the rude clay of us. It’s hard to kill. The ones who came before were brilliant, but they were fragile. Genius made of tissue paper, and the chaos blew them apart. We can be the best of both now. . .”
Teresa shifted closer. Her father, sensing her though his eyes never rested on her, tried to embrace her, but the dark threads held his arms. She put her own arms around him. His skin was burning hot against her cheek.
“We need to get him out of that fucking web,” Tanaka said. “Can he get loose? Ask him if he can get loose.”
“Daddy,” Teresa said. Tears were sheeting over her eyes and turning everything into smears of color and light. “Daddy, we need to go. You need to come with us. Can you do that?”
“No no no, baby. No. This is where I am supposed to be. Where I was always supposed to be. You’ll understand soon, I promise.”
“High Consul Duarte. My name is Colonel Aliana Tanaka. I have been given Omega status by Admiral Trejo and assigned the task of finding and recovering you.”
“We were doomed as soon as the gates appeared,” he said, but to her, not Tanaka. “If no one had taken responsibility, we would have bumbled along until the other ones came and killed us all. I saw that, and I did what I had to do. It was never for me. The empire was only a tool. It was a way to coordinate. To prepare for the war that was coming. The war in heaven.”
A hand touched her shoulder, pulling her gently back. It was Jim, his expression full of sorrow. “Come away. Come on.”
“It’s him. It’s still him.”
“Is and isn’t,” Jim said, and his voice was strange, like the cadence belonged to someone else. “I’ve seen this before. The station’s inside him. What it wants and what he wants? No way to tell one from the other. Not now.”
“You’ve seen this before?” Tanaka said. “Where?”
“On Eros,” Jim said. “Julie was like this. She wasn’t so far gone, but she was just like this.” And then, to Teresa, “I’m sorry, kid. I’m so sorry.”
Teresa blinked the sheet of tears away as best she could. In the distortion, Jim looked odd. The shape of his face seemed changed, bent in a permanent weariness and amusement. She blinked again, and he was only himself.
Tanaka was jetting from side to side, her maneuvering thrusters hissing constantly as she circled the Gothic sculpture that had been Teresa’s father. “I need you to talk to him. He needs to stop this. You have to make him stop this.”
“Colonel, I am right here, and I can hear you,” her father said. He turned his head toward Tanaka, his eyes steady and blank. “And I remember you. You were one of the first with me. You saw Mars die, and you were part of the remaking of it in the empire. This is the continuation of that. This is what we were fighting for all along. We will make all of humanity safe and whole and unified.”